For those who may be interested:

What you see aimed at the public in a video, on a TV show, on the Internet, or read in the Enquirer, etc., is not "scientific evidence."

What *is* scientific evidence? Evidence that results from rigorously conducted experiments or observations by people who know what they're doing. This evidence is then written up in a professional manner, with a highly detailed description of the procedures involved, including a mathematical calculation of the likelihood that the results are due to pure chance. A team of researchers, all with advanced degrees in a relevant to their research, is considered to be more reliable than just one. The completed article is then submitted for publication to a professionally edited, refereed scientific journal.

"Professionally edited" means that the editor is also a scientist, and "refereed" (or "peer-reviewed") means that the article is scrutinized for errors and bad procedure by other experts in relevant fields. An article may be returned to the authors with further questions, or it may be rejected for sloppy methods and conclusions that are unwarranted by the evidence.

It is an editor's duty to print cogent criticisms of a published article from other scientists and to allow the original authors to reply. Discussion provides a further protection from false conclusions.

If the findings survive all of that, they're still not established until some other team (or teams) confirms them through better experiments, or looks through a different telescope, or whatever. At that point, the scientific community generally accepts the findings as reliable - unless and until new, equally rigorous evidence appears calling them into question. If that happens, it means more research.

What's more, believable findings are consistent with older, even better established findings. If something new and contradictory appears, countless scientists will be looking at it, many of them in hopes of winning a Nobel Prize for discovering something or extraordinary significance.

If the creators of sensational commercial videos have the convincing evidence they claim to have, they should submit it to one of the hundreds of refereed scientific journals, all of which are eager to publish important and reliable data.

If they haven't submitted their evidence for this kind of review, ask yourself why not. One reason may be that it's easier to persuade the public than it is to persuade the scientific community, because video audiences, TV viewers, readers of tabloids, etc., know very little about how science works.

In fact, it's rather more rigorous than this outline alone might suggest.